Virgilio Barco Vargas

Virgilio Barco Vargas (17 September 1921-20 May 1997) was President of Colombia from 7 August 1986 to 7 August 1990, succeeding Belisario Betancur and preceding Cesar Gaviria. He was a member of the Colombian Liberal Party.

Biography
Virgilio Barco Vargas was born in Cucuta, Colombia on 17 September 1921, and he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States in 1943. He was elected to the city council of Durania that same year, serving as a member of the Colombian Liberal Party. Barco went into exile in the USA during the violence of the late 1940s, and his daughter, the future Minister of Foreign Affairs Carolina Barco, was born there. Barco returned home in 1954 to negotiate the peace process between the liberals and conservatives, and he was elected to the Senate in 1958 before serving as ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1961 to 1962. From 1966 to 1969, he served as Mayor of Bogota, and he was a director of the World Bank until 1974 and ambassador to the United States from 1977 to 1980. In 1986, he was elected President with 58% of the vote, and he supported anti-poverty programs, opened negotiations with communist rebels, and moved against the drug cartels. After leaving the presidency in 1990, he served as ambassador to Britain until 1992, and he died of cancer in Bogota in 1997 at the age of 75.